surveillance state

Of all the excuses ladled out for the Obama administration’s shredding of the Fourth Amendment while assaulting press freedom and prosecuting “national security” whistleblowers, none is more pernicious than the claim that…

[Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Tom Engelhardt’s new book, “Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.” It is available on Amazon. Engelhardt runs…

A provocative title to say the least, but it’s Foreign Policy‘s not ours: The years after World War II were not kind to Britain’s intelligence services — especially MI5, its domestic counterintelligence…

Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) might not sound quite as invasive to your privacy as it actually is. James Bridle, perhaps flush with worldwide attention from his much admired Surveillance Spaulder, has…

Ah, the sweet smell of Thursday morning outright denial-of-reality. Yes, in a sweeping scoop from The Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald, it has been revealed that the Obama administration since at least April has…

How much of the ACLU’s prescient 2004 short film Ordering Pizza, which envisions ordering a pizza online in a future dystopian electronic surveillance state, has is already starting to come true? Getting takeout has never been so traumatic:

We are facing a flood of powerful new technologies that expand the potential for centralized monitoring, an executive branch aggressively seeking new powers to spy on citizens, a docile Congress and courts, as well as a cadre of mega-corporations that are willing to become extensions of the surveillance state. We confront the possibility of a dark future where our every move, our every transaction, our every communication is recorded, compiled, and stored away, ready for access by the authorities whenever they want.

Ars Technica’s Timothy B. Lee reports on a case that will have wide-ranging implications in today’s omnipresent surveillance state: A federal judge has ruled that police officers in Wisconsin did not violate…